


Strawberry Jelly, Blackberry Jam

by caibi



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Confessions, F/F, Fluff, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 20:25:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5262290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caibi/pseuds/caibi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blackberries can be sour, even bitter at times. To make jam, however, you have to add some sugar.</p><p>This is in response to the request "Juleka asks Rose on a date!" from <a href="http://aslan-altan.tumblr.com/">aslan-altan</a> on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strawberry Jelly, Blackberry Jam

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to aslan-altan on tumblr for my very first tumblr prompt since I've put up my fic blog! This was so fun to write, you're all welcome to send me more (my url is [caibii](http://caibii.tumblr.com/))  
> There aren't enough works for the background characters. They deserve more love!

There are just some things you shouldn't tamper with, Juleka thinks.

Your sleep schedule, for example.

Or the spices in your grandmother's kitchen cabinet. The fuse box in the basement. A good friendship.

Things that are better off on their own; untouched, untarnished, just right.

It still doesn't stop her from staying up late and waking up 3 hours later.

Juleka considers this often, noting to herself that certain things are difficult to return to normal once they've been shifted. It takes far too long for dust to resettle or for her computer to restart after a particularly sketchy file download. She knows this. But every time she sees Rose, it's hard to remember.

 

They're sitting on her couch, watching some movie or another. Rose is sprawled out, her head in Juleka's lap and a bowl of popcorn resting on her stomach. Her feet just barely hang off the arm rest at the opposite end. Juleka's fingers card through her friend's hair and she's not really paying attention to the movie.

She really likes this, these lazy Sunday afternoons. Why would she do anything to change it?

 

Rose is already at their desk when Juleka walks in that morning. She's doodling in the margins of her notebook: little cakes and pies and small birds and flowers. They're a bit awkward, the lines skewed and the proportions stretched, but they're still cute and dainty. Juleka slides in next to her and steals her pencil, scribbling a quick bunny, but adding fangs and small bat wings. She hands the pencil back with a devilish smile, and Rose giggles.

As she watches her give the bunny a bowtie, Juleka wonders what she'd ever do to stop this. 

 

She knows she's a bit gloomy-looking. That she probably could afford to be a bit more bubbly or bright or...blonde. 

Instead, she's all dark colors. Black lace and button-ups. Bold, brash, and bleak. 

But she knows a blonde; a bright and bubbly one, at that. Everything she's outwardly not. 

And she knows that they're the best of friends. Two polar opposites, one large contradiction. They say that this kind of thing is what builds attraction. When two completely different people become friends, it's sure to last. Their relationship is sure to be strong.

Juleka hopes that it's true.

But she also knows that complimentary colors mix to make gray. Indefinitive and murky. She doesn't want to take the brightest of yellows in her hands only to see it dull through the tinge of the deepest of purples. 

She can't do that to Rose.

Juleka doesn't really know what brought this on, this twisted thought process. Why she'd be so concerned with tainting her best friend after what seems like a lifetime spent together.

Maybe it's because of all the happiness she's seeing, all her classmates finding love and watching them start on their new, joyful journeys. Maybe it's seeing them get along like they do, a bit different from one another, but no single pair so drastically paradoxical. She wonders what would happen if something like that were to happen to her, and she gets nervous.

It hurts enough to stay friends, to think that she's risking the girl's radiant personality just by being there with her. But she can't peel herself away. Juleka thinks it'd be for the best if she left Rose to her own devices, let her make some cheerful friends and stay happy for the rest of her life. But she can't.

She loves her enough to keep her love a secret, to keep Rose from turning gray and dreary.

 

It's when they're alone, on another Sunday afternoon, that she starts to realize. 

Rose is making jams from the berries that they had picked (or, at least, the ones that they hadn't eaten at the patch). She asks Juleka to hand her the sugar, and she starts trying to pour it into the pots on the stove.

"Rose! Be careful," she exclaims, seeing her friend's hand slip a bit, spilling sugar between the burners. She goes to grab the cup in her hand, tilting it into the closest pot in Rose's stead.

"Oh, that's alright, I could have gotten it!" Rose says, but she makes no move to reclaim the cup once it's out of her hand. 

Juleka raises an eyebrow as she goes to refill the cup and pour it over the bubbling fruit-pectin concoction on the back burner. "Sure you do. I'm just helping."

She pauses, eyeing the contents of the pot. 

"Hey, are you sure this jam'll be good?"

Rose looks up from stirring, confused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, won't this batch here be too bitter?" Juleka points at the back burner. "The blackberries we picked were pretty sour today." She scrunches up her features at the memory of their taste, standing there between bushes and spitting them out. The strawberries, on the other hand, were a lot sweeter. Juleka took to eating just those.

But for some reason, Rose kept nibbling at the blackberries, though her face squeezed up each time. She seemed to enjoy the sour kick that they had.

"Of course not! That's why we add sugar, silly. It makes it a lot sweeter."

"Oh," Juleka says. She stands there for a moment, empty cup hovering over a boiling pot. She thinks about sugar, about sweet things and bitter things, about how they'd taste if they were mixed together.

"Juleka, Juleka!" Rose's words break Juleka from her reverie.

"Wh-what?" she asks, surprised, when Rose's hands are covering her wrist.

"You shouldn't leave your hand above a boiling pot," she scolds, relief threading through her statement.

Juleka looks down at Rose's hands, wrapped over her arm and inspecting for burns that aren't there. She blushes, ever so slightly.

She considers something, a small thing, about sweetness and bitterness. She looks at her friend, her best friend, and sees her lovable demeanor. And she sees it as it was years ago, and finds that it hasn't changed since then, hadn't become gray or dull or muted. She was sugary as ever; cheerful and bright and beyond comprehension.

And so she asks.

"Rose?" she waits for her friend to look up in inquiry. "Would you like to go berry picking with me again?"

Rose beams. "Yes!"

Then Juleka is smiling and her chest feels warm and she can't quite understand what just happened or why or _how_ , but she's glad it did.

The blackberry jam splutters from its pot, and Rose launches herself into a frenzy. "Oh my gosh, the berries!" And she lunges for the spoon.

 

Later, when they're spooning the jams into jars, Rose pipes up. 

"You meant it as a date, right?"

Rose, small naïve Rose, found it in herself to wonder about Juleka's true reason for asking her to go out again the next weekend. 

Juleka pops the spoon she had been holding, all covered in blackberry jam, in her mouth and nods.

"Good." Rose declares.

Juleka blushes.

She finds that the jam is a bit tart, but there's also a very pleasant sweetness to it.


End file.
